Darnay Road

by Diane Munier

  DARNAY ROAD

  DIANE MUNIER

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2015 Diane Munier

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Diane Munier

  Cover design by BookStylings http://bookstylings.com

  …best friends.

  Part 1: 1963

  Darnay Road 1

  We live in the biggest house this side of Darnay Road. Every time after the two-fifteen chugs through town the Mr. Softie truck comes and I get one quarter and a dime out of the penny jar. I know it’s dumb to call it a penny jar when it holds all kinds of silver money but that’s what we call it, the penny jar, cause my granma is the one who started it in the depression. If you don’t know what that is, it’s this long time ago when people didn’t have any money and they were poor and put cardboard in their shoes. If they had shoes probably.

  So I run to the corner and wait for the truck and it always pulls up there and I get a cherry bomb pop or a chocolate swirl cone. Abigail gets a banana pop or a vanilla cone and we sit on my porch steps and lick, lick, lick. She always talks too much and whatever she gets it melts onto her hand and one time it got on her dress and she couldn’t play flashlight tag that night and I had to hide without her and I got so scared when Disbro Peak found me hiding in our favorite place, behind the washtubs by the back shed, I peed my underwears a little and I took them off on the back porch and stuck them in between the pop bottles so Granma wouldn’t know but then I forgot and she found them and said Miss Georgia we do not take our undies off on the back porch mercy me.

  I go to the Catholic school and we’re almost out for summer vacation. Every day when I get home I lay my schoolwork in a fan-shape on the kitchen table cause every paper has a star and they are all colors. I like purple best until I see the red. I like the gold ones too but mostly red is my favorite color and cherry. I like cherry anything at all.

  My best friend Abigail likes yellow and banana. Every year her aunt makes her a banana cake for her birthday but I always get cherry with cherry cream cheese icing and my name in chopped up cherries. My name is Georgia and my initials are GCG and that’s good because G is my favorite letter. My whole name is Georgia Christine but Granma says there aren’t enough cherries at Moe’s store to spell all that so she just puts Georgia. My last name is Green so don’t even think about it.

  My room is pink too, and my bed has a dust ruffle with two ruffles. Abigail May has one ruffle and hers is white and she spilled Kool-Aid on it at the beginning of spring and she got a spanking. She says she did and I believe it. I just have to stand in the corner though cause Granma can’t hit me on account of my eyes. She says they are just too beautiful.

  We are nearly out of school but we still have the parade and the school picnic and it will be the best picnic there ever was. I am going to walk with Abigail May and we are working on our banners. Each of us makes a banner to hold out of cardboard and broom handles and crepe paper that always fades on our hands. Mine is red and white and on it is a big picture of a cowboy roping a cow that Granma let me cut out of Look magazine. And I cut out words Granma traced that say, “Yipee-ki-yay School’s Out.”

  Abigail May’s is yellow and white and she has pictures of flowers on hers and it says, “Have a Blooming Good Summer.”

  I have five whole dollars saved for the picnic. I’ve been saving all year. Abigail May has three dollars and seventy-two cents so we are going to put that money together and divide it right down the middle. Right down it. We are going to ride the tilt-a-whirl twice, the wild pussycat once, and go through the haunted house which is really the top dusty floor of our school and the old stage made to look frightful by the eighth graders who’d as soon scare your liver out of your throat as look at you.

  Abigail says it really is haunted up there because she has looked up during recess and seen the face of Sister Mary Sponza our second grade nun who died during the school year when we were just seven years old, right there in the window. Sister Sponza came to school without her habit, just a veil she clutched under her chin. After that we didn’t have her again, and then she died.

  Now she haunts that top floor and Abigail May sees her sometimes still clutching that veil that barely covers her bald head. Abigail May also sees her Granma Ninny or Nettie, she calls her both. She says Granma comes at night and sits on her bed and smiles at her. That scared me so bad I slept with my Granma for a week until she said I couldn’t no more cause I kick her all night.

  I was going to be a nun but now I’m going to be a movie star or a folk singer. I haven’t decided. But Abigail May and I have many songs we’ve learned and she sings soprano and I sing alto. She says I sing like a boy but Granma says I do not sound like a boy at all I sound like a girl who is nearly ten who has a nice full voice and then she says I kind of sound like Patti Page, but Abigail says Ricky Nelson.

  Abigail May slapped me once, so I pulled her hair. But we were way younger then. But sometimes she makes me mad and Granma says we must take a break. I watch her from my window then. She lives across the street in big gray. We call my house big white.

  When Abigail plays by herself without me it makes me sad.

  She looks too small and I don’t know what she’s saying cause she always talks to herself and she needs me to remind her it looks crazy.

  Our favorite games are paper dolls, the Lennon Sisters are best. We divide those two each. And our Barbie dolls. Abigail May got black-haired Barbie and I got blonde-hair Barbie. She has three outfits for hers and I have two. Hers is Barbie and mine is Barbra. That way we can tell them apart. I wanted Barbie, too, and I called it first but that’s what she slapped me about and she was sorry so I said okay I’d be Barbra cause Barbra Stanwyck is okay and blonde.

  I hate, hate, hate boys. They are stinky and dumb. I was in love with Timothy Bart last year but this year I think he has cooties. But he won’t leave me alone he always tries to walk home with me. So me and Abigail run.

  Darnay Road 2

  I was the only ‘only child’ in my fourth grade class last year. A lot of them are from big Catholic families so they have lots of babies—Catholics do. Granma says me being the only child is the best thing ever cause if there were two of me she would have to hop that train behind Abigail’s house and ride it to Siberia.

  Siberia is not in America just so you know. I’m pretty sure Nikita Kruschev loves Siberia. He is a big fat Russian man. Russians hate Americans. They may be dropping a bomb on us sometime. If they do I’m going in our cellar with Granma and Abigail and her Aunt May which is why Abigail is Abigail May, but not her brother Ricky. He hangs out with the worst boys I know and they smoke cigarettes so Abigail says he will probably go with them and live in the stinky sewers. That’s pretty bad cause we think our poop goes there when we flush but those boys probably wouldn’t even mind.

  Abigail says my Granma’s cellar is as good as a bomb-shelter anyway because it has the best doors but I still wish we had the real thing. Sometimes at night I think of everything I’d put in my bomb-shelter and I could live for years and years and Kruschev could never find me. Abigail says if you come up first the Russians may shoot you or you will turn to ashes. And even if something looks good like grass and water if you don’t wait twenty years it will kill you.

  But Abigail and I fixed up Granma’s cellar with many great things we’ll need for survival. Granma and her Aunt May have no idea, bu
t we have all kinds of things down there like cans of Franco American spaghetti, Abigail’s favorite, and one can opener and Kass potato chips, my favorite. Two bags each. We have canteens, her brother Ricky’s old Davy Crocket one and his old Boy Scout one. And four blankets, one for each and candles and one flashlight we still need to get batteries for and Ricky’s old radio, and a diary so we can keep track of our captivity like Anne Frank. If you don’t know who she was she was a Jewish girl who was in hiding with her family in World War II. She got killed right when she fell in love.

  Oh, I’m in love. With James Darren also known as Moondoggie in the Gidget movies. When I have a boyfriend, and I already do, lots and lots of them and they’re all so stupid. But when I get a good one, an older one that’s not stupid, I want one like James.

  Abigail doesn’t like James Darren. She says all boys are stupid but that’s because of Ricky. She likes Bud on Father Knows Best. So she wants to marry him and I want to marry James Darren someday, or Elvis maybe. I don’t know.

  Darnay Road 3

  It’s got to stop. Abigail gets Kookie off of our favorite TV show Seventy-Seven Sunset Strip, and I love Kookie. “Kookie lend me your comb,” she says over and over.

  I get Efrem Zimbalist Jr. He’s the older detective. I always get the older ones. She gets Little Joe and I get Adam. She wanted Moondoggie and Kahuna made my stomach feel funny but he had a hairy chest so I put my foot down and she got Kahuna, so finally.

  Abigail says boys have these hot dogs down there. Weiners. I remember the first time we got Ken and we ripped his shorts off to see but it wasn’t anything, just kind of a bump. “That’s it?” she said.

  I was relying on her to know something but Ricky was older so she didn’t know anything about ‘the bump.’ And Ken wasn’t helping.

  I’m so tired of it. Not about the bump, but about Abigail May wanting all the good ones. I try to tell Granma but she says to get her the Bufferin I’ve given her the headache again.

  We have a club. We call ourselves the Bobbsey Twins. We read those books when we were younger, Abigail and me is who I mean. Then we read all the Nancy Drews only I read each one first because if I didn’t Abigail would tell me how it ended and I was so, so, a hundred million so’s in so mad.

  But this year since we’re ten I think we should change the name to Darnay Spies. Abigail says Darnay Sisters. I say The Darnay Sister Spies. Then we decide to just say Darnay Spies like I said if she’d ever listen.

  She gives me the headache sometimes. She won’t wear a skirt that doesn’t have twirl and then all day at school and on the walk home she twirls and twirls and I swear you can almost see her underwears but she says unt-uh. But fourth grade is over for summer so she wears sun-suits and they don’t twirl usually, and I wear short sets. I have three, light pink, shocking pink, and red. Abigail has about a hundred sun-suits and they tie at the shoulders and when I get mad I grab one of the ties and pull and she grabs at it and screams like I ain’t seen those polka dots on her chest about a million times.

  We both have brown hair and brown eyes, hers in a pixie cut and mine long and mostly I wear two braids. Abigail’s Aunt May says Abigail looks like Hayley Mills but she doesn’t have blonde hair. My Granma says I look like Natalie Wood, and Abigail went home mad when I told her.

  But back to what I was saying about mysteries. We are spies. Me and Abigail. We spy all the time. All the time. Abigail May never ever stops spying and I almost never do.

  See that’s why we exchanged blood. She pricked her finger then mine and we rubbed them together and swore a pledge. We are sworn to secrecy about the mysteries we solve.

  We solved two already since third grade summer when we started the club. Our first mystery was the case of the little dog that got trapped under crazy Miss Little’s front porch. Now going up to that porch took some courage. Miss Little wears red, red lipstick and some of it goes around her mouth instead of on her lips and she walks outside in her full slip, up and down the sidewalk and she calls to cars that pass. And one day we were walking to Moe’s market and she just appeared behind Abigail May. We didn’t even hear her or anything and Abigail May was talking about us putting on a carnival and we could have bingo, fish pond, ring toss and next we knew there was Miss Little talking about her dead husband John killed in the war and she wears that slip and the red lips and long red hair some in curlers, some not, and Abigail screamed and I froze and Abigail had to grab me and we ran off screaming.

  So going for that little dog and then going door to door and finding its owner was the bravest thing we’ve ever, ever done.

  We’ve got about six mysteries that we work on all the time. Day and night we never stop.

  Our biggest case is about the Hardy Boys. They live on the other side of the railroad tracks behind Abigail May’s house.

  They don’t really live on Darnay, they live on Scutter Road but their backyards face the tracks and then the backyards on Abigail May’s side of the street. But me and Abigail don’t recognize Scutter Road except by its backyards cause Granma won’t even let me sell chance tickets or anything on Scutter, I can only play on Darnay or one block over the other way when we skate in front of Moe’s market. And of course I can walk to school, but that’s in the opposite direction from Scutter Road too. Granma calls Scutter the slums.

  But the Hardy Boys come in the night. They stop outside Ricky’s window and do frog calls and Ricky climbs out and goes with them…to the slums.

  Ricky thinks Abigail don’t know, but he doesn’t even think about us being spies. I watch in my window and signal to Abigail with Granma’s big silver flashlight she can never find, and Abigail signals back with Ricky’s Boy Scout flashlight cause he quit scouts and Abigail pretty much took everything for the bomb shelter and our spy ring.

  Oh yeah, the other mystery we solved was the mystery of the altar at our church The Lady of the Bloody Heart. Not really, it’s Our Lady of the Sacred Heart but we love, love Bloody Heart best.

  So the story was there are the bones of dead nuns and priests in the big altar. And being girls we can’t go in any of the backrooms like the boys get to, Ricky even, cause they are altar boys and we are not.

  So it was Abigail’s idea that we needed to look into that altar and settle it once and for all cause we couldn’t even pray during morning mass we were so busy always wondering if the dead bones were in there.

  So we went to Saturday mass and we never, ever, ever do that because we have to go all the other days during school but not summer. So we went and then we each had our rosaries in our hands and we waited after mass, kneeling there with our black lace veils hanging along our faces which always makes Abigail feel like she has long hair and it makes me feel like a bride, but we wait there and Abigail pretends to pray but I really do because we’re about to commit a really big sin, one I’ll have to confess but I’ll disguise it as much as possible.

  So after the last old lady finally leaves we breathe a big sigh of relief and Abigail leads the way and we get in the aisle and genuflect, make the sign of the cross, and I put my rosary in the velvet pouch, and she does too, and we put those in our purses, mine red with sharp brass trim, and hers straw for summer with daisies on it. We put our missals in there too though mine won’t hardly close now, and then we keep our heads covered cause we’re still in church what do you think.

  We have never been inside the gate that surrounds the altar and keeps people out unless they are wearing vestments and are boys or old men. So I don’t even know if girls can go in here or ever have.

  But Abigail says nuns have to go in cause someone has to clean it and put in the communion so even though we’re not nuns we are Catholic and Abigail says that’s probably enough.

  So my heart is pounding so hard. I hope God’s not mad about this. But we go up to the fence and Abigail goes over. I almost die. Seeing her put her butt on that marble fence top and lift her legs and flash her underwears and then be on the other side, I can’t believe it. We’re going
to get burned at the stake for this.

  But I go right over after. Lord Almighty I nearly faint. We are standing in here and it’s so different. “It’s too holy,” I say and I say it so loud my words echo.

  But Abigail is already moving up the marble steps closer to the altar. I can’t believe her nerve but I follow her skinny white legs and her ankle socks and her Mary Janes.

  She goes up the second set of steps and my knees are weak and I have to pee. That altar is so, so tall I can’t even look up at all the saints crouching in the little spaces because I know they would give me teacher looks and I would have to faint.

  She is at the altar now and I’m biting a knuckle.

  “C’mon Georgia,” she says and I wish she wouldn’t have told all the saints my name.

  So I get next to her and she goes around the side and there’s a door cut into all that gold and she unlatches it and pulls it open and gasps at what she sees.

  I look over her shoulder cause I am a spy at heart and great balls of fire. Mops and buckets.

  She closes the door and sets the latch and I am already going over the fence. She calls for me to wait but I don’t stop. I see that confessional and I know I’m going to be in there once school starts in the fall and I’m going to have to come up with something to tell Father Anthony but for now we’ve solved our second mystery and it feels…great.

  Darnay Road 4

  Disbro Peak has a withered arm. He was born with it. He holds it against his chest like a broken wing.

  He’s skinny. And he’s mad. Sometimes he goes with the Hardy Boys, sometimes he’s with two younger boys my and Abigail’s age, Mike and Bobby. I hate them.

  Thing is Abigail May says she saw Jennifer at the five and dime and her mother was buying her a bra.